The Great Ganesha

Just came across this tidbit yesterday, from the SAJA blog forum:

Two young brothers, one of them still in college, have put Kolkata on the world?s Internet map by building the hottest online game on social networking phenomenon Facebook.

Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla have built a free online scrabble game that has 800,000 registered users on Facebook… [Hindustan Times]

The Agarwalla Brothers

Yes, it’s the the Scrabulous App on Facebook that I’m sure every user has seen, if not used. I’ve expressed my views on the whole social networking thing (and Facebook, in particular), in the past. But this is pretty cool.

There’s more:

The Agarwalla brothers run Scrabulous from the offices of their home-grown software company in an office in Calcutta.

Of the 30 software developers the company employs, a few work on the online game, “fixing bugs and improving the systems,” as the brothers describe it.

The Calcutta-born brothers are scrabble buffs in a city which is Scrabble-crazy. [BBC]

It sounds expensive, and it is – but it’s a labor of love for them, so it doesn’t bother them much.

Rajat Agarwalla said he had tried all the Facebook advertising networks and found that none earned much money. Now he is using Google AdSense to put text advertising links on the Scrabulous canvas page, and he said he is barely recouping his swelling bandwidth costs.

But that is fine with him, because developing for Facebook is only a hobby for the Agarwalla brothers.

?We see it as a project and as a community, where people are actually having fun with each other, rather than paying to have fun or thinking someone is running this as a professional enterprise,? Mr. Agarwalla said. [NYT]

Nice.

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